The food business is famously tough - just ask any restaurateur. But imagine just how tough business can get when you manufacture ingredients for some of the world’s best known consumer brands. Product and service quality must consistently satisfy meticulous standards.

The challenge facing Cedenco was managing wide-ranging customer feedback and issues in a truly collaborative fashion. Its largely paper-based system was crying out for workflow automation and collaboration to deliver new transparency and efficiency.

By effectively closing the loop on customer issues management, Cedenco is acting on the key principles of its ISO 20000 certification and best practice framework ITIL – the recognised global standard for IT service management.

Taking paperwork out of process
Debbie Tehau, Cedenco’s systems manager, was becoming frustrated. Shouldering responsibility for managing customer issues and process improvements, she was being consumed by the process.

“The system was cumbersome,” says Tehau. “I had to constantly chase people to gauge the status of complaints. It was frustrating, because we weren’t responding as quickly as we should have been.”

Simple issues reported by customers – like goods damaged in transit, or colour variations – had to be resolved swiftly but there were several sticking points unnecessarily taxing the process.

A single spreadsheet placed the burden of trafficking and managing tasks solely on Tehau’s shoulders. The lack of transparency meant that it was extremely difficult for involved parties to see the status of issues or to proactively contribute to their resolution.

With no shared organisational view or centralised collaboration, task resolution was confined to linear progression – a limitation amplified by the numerous parties often involved in resolving a single issue. The process begged for workflow automation and collaboration. But the question was how, particularly within the confines of Cedenco’s existing technology platforms?

Smarter workflows
Using Smarter Workflows, a toolkit of technology and consulting services, Fujitsu first defined the challenge and then set about working with Cedenco’s people and existing technology platforms – which at the time included Microsoft Office, portal serving platform SharePoint and electronic forms application InfoPath – to establish a better way of doing things.

On the face of it, fixing the problem sounded simple enough. But that certainly wasn’t the case. The workflow system had to manage a large number of open-ended issues and their operational interdependencies. It also had to access, via data access layers, information from the factory floor, such as production lot numbers, and ERP system information. What’s more, depending on the nature of the issue, a range of internal divisions and people had to be canvassed, necessitating the inclusion of task management features, such as assignment of responsibilities, delegation, criteria setting, automated notification, reminders and reporting.

Cedenco’s intranet is now the starting point for managing issues. Via Sharepoint and InfoPath customisation, the initiator is able to raise a form and populate it with the required information. Outlook delivers the communications backbone, first alerting, via email, the appropriate customer manager, who, within the workspace, adds additional information and establishes the management framework and timeline. In turn, other parties who have been assigned responsibilities are automatically notified and reminded to contribute. At any point in time the right Cedenco people can instantly gauge the status of issues. By using its existing applications, Cedenco has created an extremely powerful workflow application.

Closed loop issues management
The saying goes that many hands make light work. With Smarter Workflows, Cedenco has effectively joined many sets of hands to manage tasks in a truly collaborative fashion. The upshot sees shorter issue resolution cycle times and resulting improvements in customer responsiveness.

However, more than just speed and efficiency, the new system is the foundation for Cedenco’s continuous improvement programme, which is a cornerstone of the company’s ISO 20000 certification. “Cycle times are much faster – what took weeks to resolve now takes just days,” says Tehau. “It frees me up to do other things. Now I simply log and monitor issues.”

One of the special demands customers of food manufacturers popularly place on their suppliers is the opportunity to audit customer issues and improvement systems – customers want to know that they are dealing with highly responsive suppliers using industry best practice systems. Audited up to 20 times a year, Cedenco’s system is now regarded as one of the industry’s best. “Continuous improvement is one of the key principles of our ISO certification. Smarter Workflows is one of the better changes we have made to uphold our certification. In fact, the ISO certification body says we have one of the better customer issues and improvement systems there is,” says Tehau.

Another key advantage of maintaining a centralised record of individual issues is the rich data it provides for improvements. Reporting functions let system users profile individual customers, types of issues, or drill down further to profile individual member contributions, which often produce nuggets of fresh thinking for specific improvements.

“It’s a great system,” says Tehau. “Problems are dealt with more collaboratively, so everyone is contributing along the way. It really has closed the loop for us. The whole thing is now a lot more transparent. There are no dropped balls.”

Looking back, Tehau says a technology solution is only as good as the business thinking applied to the original problem. “Fujitsu really listened to what we wanted from an operations point of view. It’s always difficult to balance the needs of different stakeholders and they certainly brought together the parties and got their head around what needed to be achieved."

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